I just did my first East Coast shore dive at LBTS on Monday and really loved it. Mainly due to the cost...Free! But also due to the life and how easy the dive is. So, does anybody have any info or favorite East Coast dive spots that I should check out. I have been doing some quick research via Google and have read about a few spots but looking for some first hand info. There is one spot that has gotten me interested in it. It's the Sebastian Inlet State park. I read that there is a hole that is 35m sw of the south inlet that is 30fsw deep with supposedly some big bugs. Not sure how the viz would be though with it being so much furter north and farther away from the Florida current. I was also just looking at Google satelite images and notices some things in the water off of Singer Island around BHB. If you zoom in off of the beach you will see what look like black blocks evenl spaced out not that far from shore. There are two sets of these, one is 5X6 and the other is 5X2. Are these artificial reefs?
This is something I will do an article on in a future issue of the South Florida Dive Journal
South Florida Dive Journal > Home .... For the moment, the best shore dives in Palm Beach are :
* Blue Heron Bridge....easy beach dive/snorkel in 7 to 18 feet of water with average depth around 10 ft...Really a macro oriented dive, though some cool wide angle/larger schools of fish can be seen under the bridges.
* Breakers Reef shallow...you park on the Public Beach on the island of Palm Beach, as far north as the meter parking allows...then walk north down the beach-when you reach the big Breakers building, swim out in line with the wall of the foundation/wall of the south side of the building...First you get to a coral covered pier wrecked by a hurricaine 70 or so years ago....then 150 feet further out than the pier goes, there are a few mooring balls you will see, that mark ledges on the bottom in 18 to 25 feet of water.
*Palm Beach Inlet by Pumphouse....Best shore dive in all of Florida by a wide margin, and very hard to find parking for--meaning only a few locals really even know of this! Not too hard if you can get someone to drop you off at the extreme south end of the road that paralells the beach, from the Ocean mall on singer Island. It is about 3/4 of a mile from the mall parking to the south end of the road, so the walk will not be a good option, even for most snorkelers...If there was a group of you, maybe 6 or so, you could call Chip Armstrong of
Island Beach Service a day or so ahead of time, and he may be willing to have his people shuttle you from the mall, or suggest a plan you can use..the guy knows everything about everything on the Island. They have atv/ golf carts, etc for shuttling. If Chip can't , next best bet would be to call Pura Vida Divers, there shop is right by the Ocean mall just west of it--they "may" work something out for you if you get air from them, etc...though this is something you should try in person, not over the phone. If I was a shop, I would want to know you were a "good" diver, before I decided I would be willing to drop you at an advanced site like this.
HERE is a video of a shore dive at the pumphose/inlet , on a day when the seas had been rough for ages, so vis was not great...but dive still excellent and a great adventure for any good diver....Note** this is NOT a Novice site, it is for divers with good skills and good swimming abilities..and you must have a float...You can start a half hour before peak high tide, and let the tidal inflow pull you along the whole length of the jetty...once it is slack, you can head back...If you wait till the current is heading out fast, you better be a very fast swimmer to be able to make the turn back to the pumphouse at the end of the jetty...
One of Florida's best shore dives...the Jetty at the Palm Beach inlet..The Pumphouse... - YouTube
If you really are advanced...as good as Divemasters or better, then off the pumphouse you can tie your float to an area off the jetty about even to the access road, along a big underwater pipe, maybe 40 feet out from the shore/jetty----and head out into the channel another 50 feet south of you...this is like a wall dive, and once on the channel dive, it MUST BE treated as a VIRTUAL OVERHEAD dive, as there is no valid reason for coming straight up in the boating channel---you could easily be run over, and the best scenario you could hope for is a huge ticket by the marine patrol....if a diver was to have a reg failure and OOA event, the solution would be sharing gas /buddy breathing with buddy and heading straight north to the jetty wall, where you can safely surface.
Again, you absolutely positively CAN NOT SURFACE IN THE NAV CHANNEL....that being said, it has huge schools of BIG fish, sometimes eclipsing most of the 60 foot reefs!!!! You can see almost anything in this channel dive, remember, this is the mouth of a marine estuary, A NURSERY GROUND. Amazing stuff will go through here.....
http://youtu.be/3zUSzto-dWM?hd=1
For a very easy and exciting dive, when the baitfish are running, the beach along Singer Island can be a platform for snorkelers or scuba divers....see what is is like to snorkel in a huge half mile long baitball off of Singer Island, only 100 feet from shore !!
http://youtu.be/zhuffVfpiXY?hd=1 ** Note!! Watch this, as the intro Aerial footage shows you the entire jetty dive area !!!
We are heading over to LBTS this weekend. 
